Readings

The Federal Communications Commission formally voted Friday (August 1, 2008) to uphold the complaint against Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, saying that it had illegally inhibited users of its high-speed Internet service from using popular file-sharing software. The decision, which imposes no fine, requires Comcast to end such blocking this year.

What was at stake

Between 2006 and 2008, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), collaborated with The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution, on an investigation of the creative sector's potential contribution to neighborhood economic and community development.

Last fall after the Taos Journey conference, Anne Focke and I got together to (as we say in California) process the event. She gave me a journal for my writing and a copy of a beautiful little chapbook, A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances, originally published by the back room, Portland, Oregon.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One day we received a remarkable phone call: Two friends had just discovered an unpublished essay by the late Edna Lewis—one of America's most resonant and evocative food writers—that she had sent to a colleague years ago. A granddaughter of freed slaves, the late Edna Lewis left home when she was just sixteen years old and went on to become a renowned chef at Manhattan's star-studded Café Nicholson. Her books have spread the gospel of genuine southern cuisine and inspired a generation of home cooks.